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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27026206">Strider: Fail to be you</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrippingGalaxies/pseuds/DrippingGalaxies'>DrippingGalaxies</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>World's Edge [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Homestuck</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Blood, Character Study, Child Neglect, Depersonalization, Derealization, Dissociation, Dysphoria, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Intrusive Thoughts, M/M, Multi, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Second Person, Panic Attacks, Paranoia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, hinted past and present relationships, this is supposed to be opened to interpretation so feel free to project anything into it, touch starvation, trans male character(s), unreality, written in vignettes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 16:55:29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,945</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27026206</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrippingGalaxies/pseuds/DrippingGalaxies</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"You felt too guilty to let him know he wasn't holding you, and that he couldn't know when, where you were. It didn't seem fair, it didn't seem true, when spoken out loud. You didn't trust any eloquence from the body you were tied to, you didn't think the one controlling it trusted it either, and you couldn't, for the life of you, pick the right words to compose a reasonable explanation. It was all wrong and you never knew how to tell him that you were just dispersed fragments of a dead world."</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>World's Edge [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2268221</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. 0.(re)lapse</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>"There is a quietness to broken worlds<br/>A haunting stillness that follows<br/>Each of my wandering steps<br/>As I look for the pieces of me left <br/>Under the debris   </p><p>The calm after the storm is so much sadder  <br/>Than the one before it<br/>I mourn the things I lost in the fire and <br/>Find myself missing the burn <br/>Of the flames </p><p>I taste the ash on my tongue and wonder<br/>If I'll ever taste anything else <br/>Or if that has, too, been lost to the <br/>Blazing inferno I carried within<br/>Before the waves came to<br/>Put me out and erase<br/>Any part of me that still could<br/>In any way<br/>Sustain itself </p><p>I was the house on fire </p><p>Whoever lit up the match or<br/>Why did they ever want me to burn<br/>I don't know </p><p>And standing in the ruins of what<br/>I used to be, I know that answers<br/>Wouldn't bring me any peace<br/>Wouldn't mend a single piece<br/>Of what I've come to lack </p><p>I'll wait for the wind to<br/>Blow away the embers<br/>And for time to forget<br/>The place I used to lie<br/>There is only comfort in<br/>Erasure and oblivion<br/>In losing these scraps<br/>To the immensity of<br/>All places I never was<br/>And never could be"</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There is a cup of coffee in your hands you don't remember making. </p><p>It must be hot, because you can see the steam rising from it, but the heat itself doesn't seem to register in your palms. Something tells you it should be burning your fingers, but all you can sense is static. </p><p>Early morning light seeps through the blinds like a retro movie filter, and the world is just that, moving pictures through heavy golden blurs. It seems surreal, how brightness bleeds from the window, making flocks of dust dance against fleeting sunrays and letting warm shadows cast over the small kitchen space. </p><p>The house is silent and still, serene. Countertops clean, dishes put away, that worn, red and white stripped tablecloth you'd picked with him years ago placed neatly over the table beneath your arms. Your eyes fixate on the tiny coffee stains that never came off, specks of brown peppered here and there. You remember him begrudgingly trying to scrub them off an eternity ago, to no avail. Your eyes lose focus again.  </p><p>Maybe, you reason with yourself, maybe it's because you can't wrap your head around how bright it all is. Too used to shutting yourself into cramped rooms, to switching day and night and sleeping through entire mornings. Maybe it's your fault. And maybe it'll pass. It should pass. It usually does. </p><p>You look at your hands. They are yours, or they should be. Your eyes trace the line of each scar that crisscrosses the knuckles, palms and fingers. You remember having scars just like those on your own hands, remember how you got each one of them, but these didn't belong to you. It was within the reaches of uncanny valley, a disturbing, near perfect mirror of reality, but so viscerally misplaced it made your stomach turn. You knew they weren't yours. </p><p>You feel a constant buzz in the back of your mind, drowning out the silence. An itch, an ever-present sense of discomfort in this inertia. It's always been this way. Streams of words, whispered or thought, were a vice you could never find true reprieve from, however comfort you’ve made from it, however much anguish was derived from it. </p><p>When you were like this, it didn't matter. </p><p>You hear the static crackling, a whiff of sound reaching into it, and the eyes you see through blink slowly, chin tipping up towards the noise and finding him across the room. He's leaning on the doorstep in his pajamas, bed hair mussed up, and you watch him in layers, juxtaposed. He's there, but he isn't. No, he is. He is. You can't miss. He is.  </p><p>It takes you a moment to realize he's saying something. You see his lips moving, forming words, but he might as well be speaking another language altogether, because the letters clash too harshly against each other to be comprehensible. A collision of consonant and vowel that hit the ground and break and bleed out. It’s like being witness to a carnage and your skin crawls with the phantom pain of secondhand butchery. It was all too strong, too loud and grating. It's not his fault -it never is- but the world was wrong, everything was wrong, and you weren't you, and you couldn't understand him when you weren't there. </p><p>You frown slightly, trying to pick up on his inflection instead, hoping to at least identify a potential question. Sound echoed and bounced off his tongue to the walls and it meant nothing, it said nothing, it was just... Noise. You find yourself wishing he had subtitles, but then again, you're not quite sure if you'd find any more sense in pressed words. </p><p>He walks across the table and leans over to kiss your head. You couldn't feel his body warmth. The faintest pressure on the side of your body told you he had his hand on your shoulder. It's a hollow, hollow thing. </p><p>His expressions were wrong, erased, distorted. He wasn't him when you weren't you. It didn't make sense. Obviously, you know he's himself -and that he's real, and here, and now, whatever any of that entails- rationally, you know it all, but there was a certainty you couldn't shake, a feeling deep within you that insisted, echoed, molded your vision. You don't trust it, but you can't get past it.  </p><p>You smile for him, dry lips barely moving, and raise your eyebrows in fabricated amusement. It seems to do. His eyes soften, dissolve into melted pools of color. You try to discern their exact hue and fail. You look down at your mug of coffee to evade his gaze in frustration and methodically, robotically raise it to your lips.  </p><p>It tastes like cotton. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>This work is hugely inspired by 2x2verse (agent_florida)'s amazing piece ice age // how to destroy angels and I wholehearteadly recommend the read if the themes here are interesting to you. That being said, the next chapters will likely tackle heavier themes and the tags will be updated accordingly, but please let me know if I forget to tag anything.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. i. (scar)let</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>"The rock, the vulture, and the chain,<br/>All that the proud can feel of pain,<br/>The agony they do not show,<br/>The suffocating sense of woe,<br/>Which speaks but in its loneliness,<br/>And then is jealous lest the sky<br/>Should have a listener, nor will sigh<br/>Until its voice is echoless."</p>
<p>Prometheus, Lord Byron</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The sky bleeds red. You can’t quite articulate how or why, but you also don’t know much beyond that right now. </p>
<p>Clouds spin overhead in clusters of indistinct white fuzz, no edge to be seen where colors meet and blend, opaque and strangely corporeal. A moving palette of waltzing shapes against sanguine background, idly passing you by. </p>
<p>The sun lies in the blurred edge of your sight, a pulsing platter of light dipping into the line of the horizon, just about extinguished. Its heat lingers, clings to your sweat-soaked skin like a viscous blanket, and languishing sunrays cast a gleam over the sticky dampness of your body. There is no wind, no breeze, the air itself drenched in perpetual summer, as though trapped, compressed between the suffocating borders of land and sky.  </p>
<p>It’s hard to think straight. Your head spins, the clouds spin, the world stands still as you spiral aimlessly.  </p>
<p>You peer into infinity through the sharp margin of tinted glass. Your static body vibrates with the ghost of movement, adrenaline still ringing, pumping through your veins. Time disassembled, dispersed somewhen amidst chaotic whirlwind of dodges and collisions, and seems to have not caught onto the fact that the strife was over. You feel lightheaded, groggy with the urge you to keep your momentum, to get up and raise your sword and fight. There was something addictive about adrenaline. And something in you terrified of losing. </p>
<p>(Fleeing was never an option, you could only ever fight back or surrender. It was hardly a choice.) </p>
<p>There is pull, a dizzying vertigo, and it’s like falling upwards with the ground to your back, a single point of contact from where your weight is pulled by the air above, bringing the earth itself closer skyward. It’s an ascension, of sorts, or at least it should be. You think you can taste ozone in your tongue, in pain-laced breaths sucked to collapsed lungs, despite knowing you’re nowhere near high enough to actually sense it, that you shouldn’t, shouldn’t be.  </p>
<p>From where you lie, you can reach up and paint the white clouds red with your fingertips, with the puff of your split lips or the well of crimson erupting from the side of your body. You wonder if you can draw a picture up there, if using up the ink will make you feel any less inundated, any less ruined, like you could drown in a vast starved of oxygen as it weeps and pulls you towards it. </p>
<p>There is a calmness in the state of this moment, in the way it strays from reality. You can’t perceive depth, your vision swims, you want to snap out of it, but you can’t move. Your body won’t obey you; your mind runs in circles and it'd make sense to die in a dream of your making, but you’re wide, wide awake. You know you’re hot, that it hurts and that it’s hard to breathe, and the world narrows down to the smallest things, the ones you can still feel. </p>
<p>You worry your teeth will fall from your lips the moment you unclench them, and you’re unsure if they’d cascade milky white over wounded cement or drift upwards, to the space between doppelganger clouds, and make up a new drippy constellation of torn out nerves and shattered roots. Gravity is a funny thing when twisted inside out. You kind of want to throw up. </p>
<p>You feel the pain removed from yourself, from somewhere else, and you would be more concerned if it felt any realer. You could make a rap out of this, you’re sure, fit it into an embellished mental portrait, fit it in verse, in song and rhyme, and make it something pleasant to hear. There is something to be taken from this, is what you tell yourself. </p>
<p>Laying here, devoured by a brand of the sublime, you realize that the world is small and the world is immense, and that you have nowhere to go but here. Here, contained in matchbox rooms of angled corners, where your voice bounces off walls that press into you as hard as the sky does, where it echoes back in itself to find no answer.  </p>
<p>There is a sense of finality to this place, where all days start and end, and you could never shake the feeling that you would, too, start and end right here.  </p>
<p>You wonder, not for the first time, if you’re dying and it feels like the air is being punched out of you for a whole new reason. The dread is a string that coils in the pit of what you’d assume to be your stomach, your insides shriveling up, revolting against the very idea. You don’t want to die. You don’t know if you want to be alive, but you don’t <em> want </em> to die. You know that much. </p>
<p>Your mind snaps back to the present when something dark whizzes past your sight. Moving shadows glide through the slaughtered vast, pointed shapes and cackling sounds peering around the edges of your perception, lingering. They swim and circle the space overhead, close enough to loom, far enough to escape your reach. You can find some poetic justice in thinking they’d be here for you, bright button eyes watching, waiting in the sidelines for the moment you’d break.  </p>
<p>Maybe they were waiting for you to find a way to snatch the sun, waiting for a reason to peck you opened. You wonder what brand of joy could possibly be worth such preceding punishment. You wonder if the sun would feel like having his arms around you, if only one single time. </p>
<p>You know you’ve been here before. That you fell and bled and looked up just like that not too long ago, that it all tends to come back to this. Blood tastes just the same as it always did, and the scent of metal and sweat is detestably familiar. You hate how little catharsis there is in relieving a moment like this and muse if you’re bound to repeat it forever, if numbered days would loop into themselves, make it all as meaningless as it feels. No matter how many times this happens, you hate yourself for much it still terrifies you. You fear for your entrails. </p>
<p>Looking back, years later, you’d have a tally of deaths to account for and the title of god attached to your name, so maybe you weren’t completely wrong in these delusions. </p>
<p>You end up mentioning this offhanded train of thought to Lalonde by accident one day and find that she surprisingly can relate to the idea; at least so far as the ruined liver part goes. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I'm not really sure what to think of this chapter, for how much I rewrote and reorganized it. Hopefully I managed to get the right idea across in an interesting way. Thank you to anyone who's read it and I hope you enjoyed it!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. ii.(im)pulse</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>"(...)<br/>I am made through hazy<br/>Word and indistinct margin<br/>The world shakes in constant<br/>Unwavering vertigo and<br/>Senseless dread</p>
<p>There are layers of logical leap<br/>Between me and reality<br/>And the ever present assurance<br/>Of an unshakeable paranoia<br/>Ingrained in these bones<br/>Rooted in this rotten mind<br/>Relentless and<br/>Cruel</p>
<p>I measure word by letter<br/>And pause<br/>By pause<br/>By broken<br/>Shattered vowel<br/>Fragmented me<br/>Makes a world of<br/>Fitful lines and<br/>Stuttering paragraphs </p>
<p>There is a reason<br/>There should be<br/>Reason<br/>Among the static maze of<br/>Dead-end thought and<br/>Wandering monologue<br/>I should build pattern<br/>To situate unreality<br/>Between the comprehensible<br/>And the shouting dissonant<br/>Make maps of insanity<br/>So I won't lose track of it<br/>And call it paranoia<br/>While I can still discern it.<br/>(...)"</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>You tell yourself that you can enumerate things that exist, if you try hard enough.  </p>
<p>The clock ticks. It’s slow. You couldn't remember if you had one in the house, attached to the wall, or if you’d resorted to counting the seconds inside your head. The sound was the same, dry and curt. You don’t know if the clock exists. You cross it out your mental list. </p>
<p>You breathe in. Air exists. It should, right? It makes sense that it would. But then it also feels too tight in your lungs, compressed, and you bring a hand to your ribcage to be sure, but it's bare beneath the thin layer of your shirt, for once. So the air exists, but the pressure doesn't. </p>
<p>(He’s in the bed. You watch him breathe, his chest rising and falling. You try to mimic him. You can’t. It’s too slow.) </p>
<p>You aren’t sure when nightmare bled into reality. You aren’t sure, even, if you are actually awake. You sporadically chase away the urge to sink your thumb on the edge of your sword to find out. It didn’t end well when you did that, before. Something to do with blood stains on the carpet and too-tight hands gripping your shoulders. You have to remind yourself why it was bad, why you don’t want it to happen again, to keep yourself in check. </p>
<p>The room is a pit of shadows, the air is cold, electrified, and you’ve been staring at the darkness for long enough that your eyes grew used to it. You can make out the silhouettes of the nightstand on the opposite side of the bed, the edges of the sheets where they extend towards the door, the rectangular shape of your shared wooden wardrobe against the wall with one door opened. If you peer inside, stare at the voids between shelves for too long, you start to see distorted faces morphing in the pitch-black slots, screaming mutely, convulsing in agony. They disappear when you blink. The faces don't exist. </p>
<p>You want to get up and close the doors, check the locks once, twice, push the wardrobe against the frame for good measure, if only to be sure nothing will come out of it. But you don’t, can’t bring yourself to move.</p>
<p>Instead, you watch over him, watch over him, from the floor by his bedside. Shrunk into yourself, a hand on the handle of your sword, another clutched around your turning stomach. You don’t know what –who, exactly– it is you’re waiting for. Could be anything, anyone, you know they’ll come, you can feel it in your hammering heartbeat, hear their footsteps hiding in the rushed rate of your pulse. You know they’re moving, hiding their noise when the air shifts, when the sheets rustle, when the wooden furniture snaps.  </p>
<p>You know you’re not safe. Not safe. Not safe. You need to run, to fight, and you need to keep shaking off the impulse to wake him, to take him by the arm and drag him under the bed, to the floor, anywhere out of range from the window, out of sight from the door, press his body to yours against the corner of the room where you’re sure nothing can sneak up from behind you and you would have done so already; you would’ve done it, if you weren’t paralyzed, paranoid that the smallest movement would set them off, prompt them to lunge over you both. </p>
<p>Still, still you would have done it all already, were you completely certain he was there. </p>
<p>The more you look at him, the less convinced you are that it is really him. The thing with the clock, with how seconds tick, tick, tick away, is that your mind unravels as they do, and you start to question the things you thought you were sure of, the most fundamental pieces of reality you still thought you had some grasp over. </p>
<p>Someone –something– is in your bed, and now you don’t know if it’s him. It’d make more sense if it weren’t, it’d make more sense that he would have long since left you. It’d make more sense, even, to be staring at an empty bed, seeing someone you crave would be there with such intensity that your brain bent the very shadows of the room to create some sort of illusion. Your mind negates you any shred of comfort, of assurance, and runs blank on reasons why he'd be sleeping in your bed at all. You don’t trust yourself enough to trust him. You don’t trust anything. </p>
<p>That very idea is so disturbing to you that your mind fixates on it, and you can’t think of anything else. You can’t stop yourself, you need to be ready to deal with the worst, the worst possibility, the worst outcome. You need to know what to do if he’s not real and there’s someone else in your room; or if he is and something’s in your house to kill the two of you. </p>
<p>You think back desperately to the last few weeks, the last few months, and try to convince yourself that it was all real, that you weren’t completely insane, that you didn’t imagine all of it. You need something, anything, to rely on, anything you can trust. You try to remember when was the last time you tasted anything but static, heard anything but drowned out noise, felt anything truly solid. </p>
<p>You stumble over memories, over thoughts, and time scrambles your brain. Yesterday and three years ago seem to have happened at the same time, it’s impossible to know the order of events, impossible to tell what happened and when, if anything did at all. The more you rewind, the more you spiral. You can’t find a single thing that was unquestionably true. Your life laid out as it were could very well be a fever dream. The more you try to rationalize it, the less confident you are about any of it. </p>
<p>And maybe this was your bed, your room, and maybe you were sixteen and much too lonely. Maybe you’d lost your mind for good, for real, finally. Maybe the game never ended, maybe it never even started. </p>
<p>You watch him from the floor by his bedside, a hand clutched tight around the handle of your sword.  </p>
<p>You’re scared that when opens his eyes, they’ll be made of glass.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>If it wasn't clear already, this work does not follow any sort of linear narrative. The chapters will be related to moments before, during and after the game. It should be clear enough what takes place when and where, but there is no pattern in the order they'll be posted. <br/>On another note, there will probably be fragments of things in the beginning notes of every chapter. They'll always be related to the themes, but are not "plot relevant", per se, (if you consider this work has any distinguishable plot at all), so you can skip them in case they don't interest you. <br/>I also updated the tags, so please check them for anything that might be upsetting to you. I can give warnings by chapter, if anyone would find it better, so please let me know if it's something you'd want. <br/>In any case, thank you for reading this far and I really hope you liked it!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. iii.(con)tact</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When he first touches you, you find yourself wishing he’d stabbed you instead. </p><p>The thought comes so naturally it makes your stomach churn with the sheer wrongness of its implications. You don’t think you were supposed to think that, you know it doesn’t really fit the lines of thought normal people would have. For as much as you stray from normalcy (and frown at the very concept of it) you wish you could, in any way, comfort yourself with the idea of following a singular, reasonable guideline for human behavior. </p><p>No such luck, apparently. </p><p>The thing is: you wish you’d known what to feel, then, and pain is easy to pinpoint. You were intimately familiar with the sensation of blades skidding across your skin, familiar enough to recreate that exact feeling so viscerally in your head that you might as well be experiencing it all over again.  </p><p>(By that meter, you wonder how many times have you actually been wounded -and how many times you did it yourself) </p><p>What you knew was that, had he stabbed you, at least then you’d know what to feel. </p><p>You were... Confused. Disappointed. </p><p>You dreamt of this for years, spent nights awake trying to conceive something you never felt, piece together what it’d be like. By this point, in mirror world of isolation, you could conceive of bodies that orbit, circle around each other in intimate waltz; of eyes that linger and words half spoken, caught with teeth into lips before being exhaled; of letters pressed in ink, dichotomies of black in white, six degrees of separation contained in between each well of static white you desperately leap across to build any sort of sense. You could construct an apparition, so long as you couldn’t touch it. </p><p>You could envision invisible walls and tensioned air, compressed breaths in aching lungs and overflowing hearts in much too silent spaces, time holding its tongue,waiting to be ruptured, as you stood on the edge of <em>something.  </em>You knew anticipation, and anxiety, and the panicked scramblings for coherent lines of thought, even then. It’s well-known vertigo, the habitual spiral, the usual descent.  </p><p>A leap of faith, a certainty you’d fall, a prayer for a soft place to land. </p><p>There was a recognizable ache in your every <em>almost. </em> You’d known longing, and so much of what it feels to be deprived; it’s the empty cradle, the lack of warmth, the emulations of human presence you were surrounded by. </p><p>Even in your love, it's all ever been an idealization of absence, all smiling ghosts in empty rooms, all hollowed out echoes of laughter. It was a voice you never heard, expressions you never saw, sculpted to the finest details in the void of air by the side of your bed. </p><p>Loving him had been desperation in lack, had been a thorough starvation of all senses, all reason, and it was all distance and yearning. The altar to this love worships a god of the gaps, it was built upon things much more imagined than tangible. You were safe there, safe in this feeling beyond reality, where you had the assurance, the anguish of knowing his hands couldn’t truly reach you. Deprivation was easy, was self-inflicted, and you couldn’t, wouldn’t die from it. You knew that, were it possible, it would have happened years ago. </p><p>To bring this into the world, somewhere you could see, was nightmarish, was clumsy and flawed and fragile. The exhilaration of it all had you dizzy, lightheaded. Presence was overwhelming, tangibility had you sick. The feeling of your famished skin grazing his for the first time wouldn’t fit in however many words any language ever conceived could offer you, it was doused in paradox, made meaningless, and now, in the moment after having lived it, you aren’t even sure you even enjoyed it. </p><p>It stung, simultaneously too little and too much, and it was disorienting. You felt it all over, your perception narrowing down to that singular point of contact, and yet you couldn’t even tell if it was a good thing or not. His skin felt like tiny needles pressed against yours, a thousand of them, placed apart just enough that the pressure points wouldn’t rid you of the pain. You didn’t know if you wanted to pull him closer or to push him away. You wanted it to last forever, and you wanted it to end as soon as possible. </p><p>You felt an ache in the bottom of your lungs, a pressure trying to coax you into hyperventilating, and it took all your effort to keep your breathing even. You could feel the panic rising, looming, ready to devour you, and it was so hard to pretend you weren’t shaking, weren’t dizzy, weren’t terrified.  </p><p>The distance between you and reality seemed to expand with your every forcibly regular breath. A tick of time and another and a sort numbness bloomed, spread from the tips of your fingers to the wells between your ribs to the nerves of your legs and tips of your toes. It was a cold wave of static, a sudden stupor, and it felt like floating an inch above the ground, an inch above your body. It felt like nothing, and it still seemed cold.  </p><p>Icepick fingers twitched, curled around his in sharp edge and warm, soft metal. Planes of scarred palms clammy, but transparent -it’s just sweat.  </p><p>He didn’t notice, in the end, and your mind fizzled out the moment he left. You came to an infinity of minutes later, pressed against the corner of the room. You looked at your hands, a phantom sensation of his own fingers lingering across your knuckles, and slammed your fist against the first solid surface within your reach. A dull ache zipped up your nerves, set them alight, and you felt like you came down by a millimeter, closer to the ground. </p><p>
  <em> So, so weak. </em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>There is nothing in the beginning notes of this chapter in particular, I couldn't really find anything that fit. If I'm honest for a moment here, things have been really tough and the last months have been the worst of my life. I'm getting back on my feet, maybe, slowly. I don't know what to think of this chapter, it wasn't in my plans for this fic at all, I might edit it or delete it later, but I need to move forward in this story in some way, so I apologize if it sounds off in some way. I still have a lot of ideas and I want to keep this story going, hopefully someone who's made it here found the read enjoyable too.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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